Technical Field
The present teaching generally relates to advertising. More specifically, the present teaching relates to detecting abnormal online user activity.
Technical Background
In the age of the Internet, advertising is a main source of revenue for many Internet companies. Traditionally, providers of goods/services and/or advertising agencies provide advertisements to be displayed on different platforms. Limited by the cost of producing the advertisement, and that of advertising, most advertisements are short but desire to deliver the right message to the audience. When an advertisement is provided with content (e.g., within a webpage), a user is able to click on that advertisement, which may direct the user to a particular website associated with the advertisement. Each “click” is also associated with a monetary exchange between the advertiser associated with the particular advertisement being provided, and a provider.
Online advertisement, in a basic format, includes a buyer and a seller—the buyer who to pay to have an advertisement displayed, and the seller who gets paid to display the buyer's advertisement. In slightly more complex systems, intermediary systems (e.g., ad networks) are also included, where the intermediary system monitors the activity of the publishers and advertisers. The intermediary system may also take publishers (e.g., sellers) and pair them with advertisers (e.g., buyers), typically pairing the advertiser willing to pay the most for a particular publisher's display space. The intermediary system receives a portion of the monetary exchange between the publisher and the buyer.
Ad exchangers function similarly to intermediary systems, however ad exchangers allow intermediary systems like ad networks to buy and/or sell advertisements. Therefore, one ad network is able to sell its publishers' ad space t another network and/or buy ad space for its advertisers—thereby allowing the corresponding advertiser's advertisement to reach a larger audience. The differences between ad networks and ad exchangers, however, is that ad networks in the exchange are not able to buy and sell one another's advertisements until a contractual agreement describing how traffic will be bought and sold between the two is established.
Such ad exchangers, while extremely useful to the various parties mention above, are susceptible to fraudulent activity, perpetuated commonly by cyber criminals. For instance, cyber criminals can develop programs to control compromised computers, or bots, and network them into a botnet, which can be instructed to view and click ads. This action simulates user traffic and, as a result, generates revenue for the cybercriminal as the cybercriminal can simply generate a webpage, sign up as a publisher, and direct their bots to view and click advertisements rendered by their own website.
Therefore, detection of fraudulent activities associated with user activity of a webpage is necessary to alleviate/minimize cyber-criminal activities.